Shrinking Bush / S.F. psychologist argues that hyper-masculinity is undermining the American political culture

Dave Ford, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, September 17, 2004

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Dr. Stephen Ducat author of the new, "Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity," in his office. 8/31/04 in San Francisco
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

Dr. Stephen Ducat author of the new, "Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity," in his office. 8/31/04 in San Francisco
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

Photo: Darryl Bush

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COVER OF "THE WIMP FACTOR" BY STEPHEN J. DUCAT, BEACON PRESS

COVER OF "THE WIMP FACTOR" BY STEPHEN J. DUCAT, BEACON PRESS

Shrinking Bush / S.F. psychologist argues that hyper-masculinity is undermining the American political culture

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As the candidates have scrambled to prove their uber-stud bona fides during the summer presidential campaign (George W. Bush chain-sawing trees on his ranch! John Kerry windsurfing!), the specter of war has dominated news stories and political discourse (Iraq for Bush, Vietnam for Kerry).

War is both a reality and a metaphor. When it comes to decoding American manhood, war's realities -- missiles, tank-mounted long-barreled guns, rifles (some with bayonets) and aspects of penetration and domination -- suggest metaphors that might have made Freud chuckle.

Alas, the father of modern psychoanalysis is not with us. But Bay Area psychologist and author Dr. Stephen J. Ducat is. His book "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity" (Beacon Press; $25), released this month, looks at the sometimes debilitating effects on U.S. politics and foreign policy of a "femiphobic" masculinity -- one split off from all things "feminine." (Ducat will be reading on Sept. 26 at Modern Times Bookstore.)

The book may stir controversy for challenging conventional notions of masculinity, piercing hyper-masculine sacred cows and disseminating a left- leaning analysis. (A Publisher's Weekly review noted that "this book does preach to the converted, (but) its fresh and complex insights may reach a new generation of swing voters.") Yet such challenges are the therapist's stock in trade.

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"Psychoanalysis exists to help the patient understand what they don't know and why they don't want to know it," Ducat (pronounced doo-KOT) said late last month, seated in the San Francisco office where he sees patients.

"The Wimp Factor" suggests that American hyper-masculinity -- as seen in, but not limited to, the Bush administration, Christian fundamentalism and right-wing U.S. policy -- has created a contentious political landscape in which more and more men are becoming conservative. In campaign battles, politicians, meanwhile, "feminize" their opponents to establish macho credibility and call into question their opponents' manhood. (In his speech at the Republican convention, Vice President Dick Cheney told delegates that Kerry "talks about leading a 'more sensitive war on terror,' as though al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.")

Ducat said that men with the extreme type of masculinity afraid of characteristics traditionally considered feminine -- self-reflection, attunement to others, appreciation for human interrelatedness -- may become sociopaths: those possessed of a guilt-free capacity to hurt others for personal gain.

"The Bush administration is the most sociopathic American administration in my lifetime," Ducat said, citing the administration's unilateral assault on Iraq and, leading up to it, apparent falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

Ducat has divided the book into chapters examining cultural socialization of young males; the history of maleness in American politics; George H.W. Bush's so-called wimp factor; the hyper-masculine male's terror of women he sees as "castrating" (think Hillary Rodham Clinton); how Bill Clinton, perceived as submissive to Hillary, was "re-masculinized" by the Monica Lewinsky affair; the ways working-class men sabotage their self-interest by voting Republican; and how gender considerations have affected the post-Sept. 11 era, including in the Iraq conflict. Along the way, Ducat explicates concepts such as the mythical phallus and the gender gap in American politics since Ronald Reagan's 1980 election.

The idea for the book occurred to Ducat during the 1988 presidential campaign that pitted Bush I against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Ducat began collecting information from various high and low media sources: political cartoons, late-night TV comedy monologues, fringe publications. (He further bolsters the book's arguments with reams of academic research.)

Ducat filled filing cabinets with so much material, he says, that writing "The Wimp Factor" involved a painful process of data elimination. "I could probably have produced three or four volumes of this stuff," he says. (A slide show accompanying the bookstore reading will include material not in the book. )

Ducat, 54, lives in the North Bay with his wife and child. (He declined to say where for reasons of personal privacy.) He stays slender through gym visits, trail runs and mountain biking excursions. A dark, grey-flecked beard frames a narrow face that effuses warmth when he smiles. His politics are left of center, but his analyses are as much psychoanalytical as political. In many ways, "The Wimp Factor" brings to bear a lifetime of political agitation and psycho-social observation.

During his high school years in Rossmoor (Orange County), Ducat created an underground newspaper that drew the attention of the FBI. Agents pulled him out of class, he says, and asked for the name of the "Commie teacher" who'd produced the paper. "That was a big compliment to my writing," he said with a laugh.

He ran away from home when he was 17, because, he said, "It was 1968. The world was going on every place but Orange County, and I was adamant about being part of it." In the Bay Area of the early 1970s, he involved himself in left-wing political guerrilla theater. "I had a lot of adolescent and post- adolescent fantasies about the impact my politics could have," he said.

Reagan's rise in 1980 changed that. Ducat felt startled and dispirited to realize that many Americans -- especially those working in manufacturing and the service sectors -- appeared to feel a kinship with a president whose policies undermined their personal and economic security. He withdrew from political activism. "I went through a period of apolitical misanthropy," he said.

Two years after Reagan's election, Ducat began studies at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, a graduate training program for clinical psychology. He focused on an interdisciplinary combination of social and personal psychology, and later his dissertation was published as the book "Taken In: American Gullibility and the Reagan Mythos" (Essential Science).

"The source of my greatest despair -- the gullibility of Americans and their capacity to go against their own self-interest -- became a really interesting intellectual question to grapple with," Ducat said. "The very phenomenon that (had) made me despair piqued my curiosity -- and re- politicized me."

Ducat graduated in 1986 with a doctorate in psychology and soon began seeing patients. He began teaching at San Francisco's New College of California, an alternative school promoting interdisciplinary study and close professor-student relations. He teaches classes in psychology and critical and social theory. "It's a place that, while not financially lucrative, actually supports doing critical interdisciplinary scholarship," he said. "I've never been interested in being quarantined to one discipline."

Ironically, the similarly category-spanning nature of "The Wimp Factor" nearly prevented it from seeing bookstore shelves. Some publishers, Ducat says, turned it down simply because they couldn't figure out how they'd market it. "There's not a lot of support for thinking across disciplinary boundaries," he said.

The same is true in the world of hyper-masculine men. In their most fundamental iterations, they eschew all forms of intellectual, political and personal complexity, and show a fear of all things perceived as feminine -- including women and gay men -- that might seem comical were it not so dangerous.

The abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are one result. Online photos released in the spring showed prison guards -- mostly U.S. soldiers and private contractors -- forcing Iraqi inmates to endure humiliations that included publicly masturbating, wearing lingerie and dogpiling on one another.

"It's a scandal about the attempt to feminize the enemy, literally and figuratively," Ducat said. Noting that some guards were alleged to have sexually violated male teen inmates, he added, "The anal rape metaphor of military conquest that has been a subtext animating American foreign policy since the Persian Gulf War has extended into this one -- and the Abu Ghraib scandal is the extension of that." The guards' actions, he said, "speaks to their sense of phallic unaccountability."

The American presidents responsible for the two recent Iraq conflicts are, of course, Bush pere et fils. The former's problem in his 1988 presidential bid is summed up in the title of Ducat's book, which is taken from a Newsweek cover story on the then-vice president's campaign. Bush was perceived as an effete patrician and a Reagan yes-man, hardly the "man's man" male voters wanted to see running the country. So his handlers tried to toughen his image: He was photographed eating pork rinds. But, as Ducat details in his book, Bush's true "re-masculinizing" in the public mind only came after the success of the Persian Gulf War.

During his 2000 presidential campaign and while in office, George W. Bush masked his patrician roots by appearing as a man's man who acted like a good ol' boy from a Texas frat house. Proof that the son also rises, he toppled Saddam Hussein.

"W. finished the masculinization that his father couldn't really complete, " Ducat said. Yet George W. Bush's macho posturing is essentially empty, Ducat contends. That vacuity was most plainly exemplified by the infamous May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity, in which the president declared an end to combat in Iraq.

Bush, whose fighter-pilot father had been shot from the sky in World War II, and who himself had avoided service in Vietnam by serving in the National Guard, was a passenger in an Air Force jet that roared onto the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln. He strutted across the carrier in a green flight suit, the snug harnesses of which accentuated his groin. (In "The Wimp Factor," Ducat quotes former Nixon White House heavy and right-wing and radio personality G. Gordon Liddy gushing about the presidential package on Chris Matthews' May 8, 2003 "Hardball": "Check that out ... what a stud.")

Ducat calls the photo opportunity "a masculine drag performance," and says it was "an assertion of the superficial as enough. 'Hey, we got rid of Saddam, there's nothing left to do but celebrate our wisdom and our power. It's party time.' It was a massive denial of reality."

If so, it was one in keeping the Bushian fear of therapy, masked as disdain, which Ducat limns in "The Wimp Factor." It is hard to imagine George W. Bush on the analyst's couch, Ducat says: "Not only is he not self- reflecting, but he is like his father -- phobic about self-reflection and about others reflecting about him."

Were the Bushes -- or any of the closed-off hyper-masculine men Ducat writes about in "The Wimp Factor" -- to reflect deeply, they would likely come up against the twin terrors of aging and death, subjects taboo in a country predicated on optimistic expansion and eternal youth.

"Age and death are very un-phallic," Ducat said with a chuckle. "They speak to weakness, fallibility, uncertainty, impermanence and dependency."

Self-reflection is a low priority for many conservative males, so Ducat is prepared for his book to stir antagonism. He expects some men to dismiss it as reductionist psychobabble. Still, his wryly self-acknowledged "grandiose hope" is that "The Wimp Factor" enters the national discourse during this over- amped election season.

"Part of the reason I wrote the book is that I didn't want these dynamics to be (lying) under the surface without being commented on," he said. He added, "It's much harder to engage in an enactment of an unconscious dynamic like femiphobia once you become conscious of that enactment."

WHERE TO GO

Dr. Stephen J. Ducat will be reading from "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity" at 2 p.m. Sept. 26 at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia St., San Francisco. (415) 282-9246.

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